


?

by DemonRomantic



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Comedy, M/M, Trippy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:35:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22195621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DemonRomantic/pseuds/DemonRomantic
Summary: This is just straight up trippy with some funny and zest thrown in.
Relationships: Bill Cipher/Dipper Pines
Comments: 1
Kudos: 23





	?

?  
By DemonRomantic

Dipper hadn’t seen Mabel for several hours. It wasn’t like her to not announce to everyone where she was going, and if it had been a secret, she would have at least told her twin. Pacing the floor of the attic that had once been their shared room but was now used for storage space, Dipper tried to think of where she might have gone. It had been only a couple of days since they had returned to the Mystery Shack for their senior trip, having decided to help Soos who was running everything by himself these days since Wendy had gone off to college, and the twins were still in the middle of cleaning.  
Both Mabel and Dipper had decided that they wanted to stay for at least a gap year before trying out college, and even their gruncles, Stan and Ford were coming back for a few weeks. Dipper had been so caught up in nostalgia and starting his own journal, that he hadn’t noticed when exactly Mabel had slipped away. Opening the triangular window, Dipper called out of it.  
“Mabel! Mabel?”  
There came no answer.  
Pulling the window shut again, Dipper placed an inquisitive palm underneath his chin. “Where could she have gone? Maybe to catch up with some of the locals? Or…” He sat down on a beaten-up sofa that was covered by a drape and coughed as a plume of dust puffed out of it. “Geez. It’s amazing what a couple of years will do to a place. Seems like a different universe almost.”  
“There are multiple universes, kid. Some of them fit right inside of your own.” An ominous voice echoed around the small room, before Dipper stood and spun to see a tall figure leaning against the frame of the door.  
The man was adorned in a dapper outfit that was a tacky shade of yellow, and he leaned on a cane as he grinned maniacally from beneath a black top hat. His blonde locks draped over an eyepatch with a question mark in its center, while his exposed eye had an abnormally elongated pupil.  
“Hey, there ‘Pine-tree’. Long time, no see.”  
“Bill Cipher?!” Dipper pondered aloud in horror.  
“In the flesh! So, what do you think, huh?” Bill came into the room and did a spin, using his cane to pivot. “I whipped up this vessel myself, turns out it’s not as hard as I thought to physically inhabit your dimension.”  
Dipper shook his head in recovery from the shock and put on a determined face. “I thought that you were…”  
“Dead? Gone? Like I said, multiple universes fitting into one, you need to open up your mind to the possibilities. It’s a new timeline, and I’m a new me. Go ahead, feel it.”  
He had extended his arm out. Dipper hesitantly poked the arm, and it felt completely real.  
“How come you’re still able to poof in and out like before if this body isn’t a manifestation?”  
Spinning the cane on his finger, Bill let it smack Dipper lightly on the top of his head before shrugging. “I’m a demon, dummy, I may not be able to tamper with your perception like in the dreamscape, but I can still bend the rules. Speaking of which, I was wondering if you wanted to get into some mischief, I’ve been feeling kind of lonely. What has it been anyway? A couple hundred years, a few hours? My perception of time here is a little askew. You look taller, and less sweaty and akward.”  
Dipper rubbed his smarting head and frowned. “I am; and it’s only been five years since you started Weirdmagedon.”  
Bill cocked his head to the side in confusion. “Weird-ma-what-now?”  
“Don’t play dumb with me, Cipher. You know perfectly well what you did.”  
There was a moment of quiet while Bill pursed his lips and thought. “Hmm. Nope! Not ringing any bells.”  
“You’ve got to be kidding me, you honestly are going to pretend like you don’t remember?”  
“Pretending’s got nothing to do with it. Listen, ‘Dippin-dots’, I’ve been around for a really, really, reeeeally long time and I’ve got to tell you, that makes you forget a lot of things. Too much stuff gets crammed together into one container, and you can’t always fit everything into another. I had to do a lot to get this vessel able to handle me, and that meant giving up some extra baggage. Think of it as a sort of cross-dimensional dementia. A few screws went missing, but I’m still able to remember you… and your sister.”  
Dipper’s ears perked at that.  
“You know where she is? What did you do with her?”  
Bill raised his palms in innocence. “I didn’t do anything, I just so happen to know where she is, but I don’t think you’ll like it when I tell you. That is if I decide to.”  
Dipper, having had enough of his games, took Bill by the front of his shirt and slammed him into the wall. “I’m not messing around with you, tell me where my sister is, or I’ll show you what it feels like to have a physical form!”  
“Ooh, looks like little old ‘Pine-tree’ grew a pair of ‘cones’ while I was away. Alright, I’ll tell you where she is, but it’s going to cost you something. Demons don’t make deals for free, you should know that by now.”  
Dipper released him and stood back, eying him suspiciously. “What is it that you want?”  
Bill straightened his lapels and smoothed out the front of his shirt, before extending a be-gloved hand towards Dipper and prompting him to shake it. “I want a truce. You say that I caused you a lot of grief in the past, well I had to throw most of that out to fit what I wanted to keep inside of this form. Let’s let bygones be bygones and forget about that timeline so that we can start over from scratch, what do you say?”  
“I don’t even know if you’re telling the truth, which you most likely aren’t, so why in the world would I trust you?”  
Bill retracted his hand with an exasperated sigh. “Look… Dipper. I lost most of my sanity over the eons that I’ve been wandering between dimensions. Your sense of right and wrong don’t matter when the rules vary from plane to plane and you don’t even belong to any one of them to begin with. I decided that I want a little more stability. This world has physics that keep you pretty grounded and you have to follow certain rules in order to be accepted in it. One of those rules is that if you want to move forward, you have to let go of some of the things dragging you down. Kind of ironic, considering I can’t float anymore, but hey, I do enjoy eating and being able to feel. The biggest thing I feel, though… is guilt.”  
Dipper wanted to believe that there could be even a shred of good in someone like Bill, but the one thing he wasn’t lying about was being a lunatic. Still, he didn’t have any leads to Mabel and if he had something to do with her disappearance…  
“I’ll agree to a truce, if you can prove you deserve it. That means no backstabbing, no withholding any information for yourself, and biggest of all, you leave me, and my family, and my world alone.”  
“Deal.” Bill said, sticking his hand out once again.  
Dipper lifted his hand hesitantly, before taking hold of Bill’s. The once triangular being chuckled before letting it evolve into a maniacal laugh that seemed to make the walls shake as a vortex of dark energy swirled about them. Dipper tried to let go of the hand clutching his, but Bill’s grip was too strong. The demon withdrew his other hand from behind his back and revealed that he had been crossing his fingers. Leaning in close to Dipper’s face, he whispered eerily.  
“Don’t worry, ‘Pine-tree’, I’m a man of my word.”  
With a snap of his fingers, Bill vanished, and Dipper crashed to the floor; the room was still yet again. Brushing himself off as he got to his feet, Dipper noticed that something was different, yet very, very familiar. In place of the disorganized clutter that had been scattered around the attic, it was now clean and held two beds with decorations around them that hinted of opposing genders.  
“Am I…?” Dipper began, but then heard someone coming and in a panic scrambled beneath his old bed.  
A pair of voices trailed into the room, as two sets of shoes walked across the floor.  
“I’m telling you Mabel, I really think that you should stop it with the whole summer-romance fantasy you keep trying to make happen. Do you really think people fall in love that easy?”  
“Oh, you’re one to talk. You still haven’t told Wendy how you feel.”  
“T-that’s because…”  
The argument trailed off, as Dipper began to freak out. He remembered this happening when he and Mabel were twelve, and yet the déjà vu was playing out before him anew.  
“T-this is…”  
“Good times, huh kid?”  
Dipper shouted as Bill suddenly materialized beside him in his human form as if he had been there the whole time.  
“Relax, ‘Bean-dip’, they can’t hear or see us. You… can’t see you? Huh? The point is, were traveling between realities right now. I couldn’t agree to your terms entirely, because the only way we’re going to find Mabel, is in one of these alternate spaces, and that means pestering alternates of you and your family. I’ve just got to figure out which one she fell into.”  
“What do you mean, ‘fell into’?”  
“Well, I’d be breaking some rules if I let a mortal know all of the details, but I can at least tell you the gist… You know that Blendin fella with the time enforcement organization? He can only travel back and forth in time within your current timeline and reality. Me, I can travel through any timeline of any reality. Again, it all got really confusing, even for me, and I was sick of riding around in the dreamscape. Buzzes are only fun if they don’t become an all the time sort of thing, you know?”  
“Why are you helping me, really? If you’re an all-powerful being, can’t you just make up your own reality with your own rules?”  
“I already tried that, remember? It didn’t really work out.”  
“You WERE lying! And it wasn’t your own, it was my world that you screwed around with!”  
“I fudged the truth a little to get you to trust me, yes. I’m a terrible creature. Now that we’ve established that, the reason I’m helping you out, is because I like you. It doesn’t matter which reality I’ve visited; you always are interesting.” Bill blinked his exposed eye slowly, making Dipper shudder. “I’ve wanted to try something for a while now, but in other timelines, well… It had negative consequences for me. I’ve checked already, and this way we both get what we want.”  
“I want to find Mabel.”  
“And we will, but if you don’t stay close to me then you may end up lost just like her, and that’ll cause a big old snag in the fabric of the space time continuum for every creature in it.”  
“If this is a different reality, then why do I remember it?” Dipper watched his younger self walk back out of the room while the younger Mabel pouted on her bed with a magazine hosting celebrity boy bands on the cover.  
“Oh, that’s cause some alternate realities are similar up until they hit a different tangent. Just watch.”  
Mabel sighed and tossed aside her magazine. Making sure she was alone, she rummaged through her dresser until she found the journal marked with the number 3.  
“What the-?”  
“In this reality, Mabel was the one who found the journal while you actually ended up dating Wendy.”  
“Really?”  
“No, Mabel just found the journal. You’re still an awkward tween here, too.” Bill chuckled.  
Dipper growled through his teeth.  
“Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Anyhoo, looks like your timeline’s Mabel isn’t around here. Let’s keep checking.”  
Bill made a motion like he was opening a bag of chips, and a glowing portal opened up between them before he extended his hand out for Dipper to take. Dipper just glared at it.  
“I told you, ‘Pine-tree’, if you don’t stick close, you’re gonna get sucked into a wormhole.”  
He resentfully took Bill’s hand and then felt as if he were on a roller coaster that suddenly dropped, before he ‘thunked’ onto a hard surface. Bill helped him to his feet and he looked around in awe at his new surroundings. Everything, including them, seemed to be white-washed and Dipper was feeling a distinct familiarity of when he had gone through the chaos bubbles with Wendy.  
“What is this place? It doesn’t look real. And what’s with my voice, it sounds like I was recorded on a retro microphone.”  
“It’s best if you don’t dwell too much on the different stops we make. It might make your brain explode. Just know that every time we ‘jump’ it’s going to be a little trippy.”  
“This is more than trippy, it’s…”  
“Shh.” Bill put a finger up to Dipper’s mouth. “Be vewy, vewy, quiet. I’m tracking Mabels.”  
Reaching into the collar of his shirt, Bill extracted a shotgun from thin air and then proceeded to turn his top hat inside-out so that it looked like a brown hunting cap. He began comically tip-toing away as if he were following footprints.  
“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, this is too much.” Dipper shut his eyes and rubbed his temples as he sat back down. “Tell me this is all an illusion and that you’re just messing with me!”  
Bill pulled Dipper up by his collar and made him look him in the eyes… well, eye. “How do you think I feel? This is just one of many worlds that make up the multiverses, kiddo. There are millions and billions more, some of which haven’t even happened yet!” Releasing him, he relaxed and shook his head. “Look, Dip, I thought maybe since you know your sister best, you could get her back where she belongs. The reason she’s gone missing is because she made a deal with me.”  
“What? Why would she do that?”  
Bill actually looked serious for once, despite his unusual alterations to his appearance in this dimension. “Because, she wanted to experience some nostalgia. When you two where kids, the summer I came along and screwed around in your world, she says she missed that part of her life. Like a lot. I just so happened to want to see you again, so I took her up on the offer. The problem is, she somehow wandered not only out of your timeline but your dimension too, and now I have to go and find her so that she doesn’t get lost, or worse, tamper with some other dimension. If she does, she could unravel yours.”  
Dipper had to absorb that for a moment, and blinked. He had a thousand questions, but only one slipped out coherently. “Why would you want to see me again?”  
Bill rolled his eye. “I’ve really got to spell that out for ya? Okay, here goes...”  
He took a deep breath, and a portal opened up beneath them, they both dropped through as Bill pinched his nose like he was plunging into a swimming pool. When they landed again, Dipper found that he looked like his normal self. Relieved for a brief moment, he screamed when Bill startled him by appearing right in front of his face. Before Dipper could recover, Bill was kissing him full on the mouth. The shock lingered until Bill pulled away with a wistful smile.  
“There are certain realities in which people fantasize going to. In a way… they can be real, but only as a dream. People go insane trying to find the reality that they want, cause they aren’t satisfied with their own for whatever reason. It can be really difficult for some people to alter their own lives to meet their expectations of what it should be… What I’m getting at is that I’m in love with you.”  
“WHAT?!”  
“I know, I know… you don’t get it… This is really hard for me to explain in words, but in some realities… we are a couple, and I personally like those realities better than the one we came from. It’s so difficult to explain when you don’t already understand. It’s like trying to show somebody the face of god!”  
Dipper felt like he was going to black out and swayed on his feet. Bill caught him, with a frown.  
“Stay with me, ‘Pine-tree’. You don’t get it yet, but maybe after a few more jumps you’ll start to grasp the idea…”  
They fell into another dimension, one with a sandy beach that led to a carving of a massive woman with several arms. Resting at the base of the statue was a house. The dimension after that, looked as if everything had been painted by a Renaissance artist, while the next one hosted an alternate version of him and Bill in his triangular form sitting at a cafeteria table in what looked like a high school, while an array of unusual people and talking animals that looked like they had all been drawn by different artists were sitting at tables around them.  
“This is starting to feel a little too, ‘Rick and Morty’ for me, so I think we should take a breather.” Bill said after glancing over at Dipper, who looked like he was going to break down.  
Jumping once more, they were back in the attic, although by this point Dipper couldn’t tell if it was the one he had originated from, or an alternate. He hunched onto all fours and began dry heaving, narrowly avoiding puking on the floor thanks to the trash bin Bill offered him. Giving him a few moments to regain his dignity, Bill rubbed Dipper’s back in a sympathetic gesture until he stopped gagging.  
“Sorry to overwhelm you like that all at once. You good?”  
Dipper nodded slowly, wiping away remnants from his mouth. “Those… Those were all different realities. They were all real, but…”  
“Wow, wow, wow! Easy does it, Dipper. Don’t try to process it all in one sitting. That’s how you end up going brain dead. If you absolutely need to be stable, start off with one question, and only one question at a time.”  
Taking a deep breath, he tried to think of only one when there were way, way more than that. “Is this my reality, where we are, right now?”  
“Yes.” Bill said carefully. “We are in your timeline, in your dimension, but I took us to the point in time between when either of your uncles were staying here, so the cabin is empty. It’s just us.”  
“You are from my reality, but you somehow can travel to other ones… how?”  
“Like I said, I’m a demon. My kind exists as a manifestation of dark thoughts. Wherever there is thought, I can go. I’d try asking something less complex if I were you.”  
“Okay…” Dipper sat down on the floor and crossed his legs, keeping the trash can close. “You came to this reality to make a deal with Mabel, and you said you wanted to see me because… you’re in love with me… what did you get in exchange for your deal with Mabel, exactly?”  
Bill became sheepish. “Time with you on an adventure... Listen, before you ask any follow ups to that, I’m going to explain this one thing; I can manipulate perspectives in the dreamscape, and in a physical form I can feel what you feel, but one of the things that I cannot do is manipulate free will. That’s the reason that I have to make a deal in order to persuade you to do what I want. I knew that you wouldn’t agree to being around me after everything I did unless there was a good reason, so I thought of something harmless to get you to hang out with me…”  
“You call blowing my mind harmless?” Dipper chuckled, despite himself.  
Bill blew a raspberry and waved his hand. “Please, that was a teaser taste.”  
“Then, Mabel’s safe?”  
Bill nodded. “She always was. What I said about losing her wasn’t bull, though. She wandered away and got sucked off somewhere. I can keep looking for her on my own, but it would be a lot more fun with some company.”  
Dipper thought for a long, hard moment. He had just been shown something that was making him question everything. It was like being stuck in one of those dreams inside of a dream, and when you wake up you feel like Rip van Winkle. Everything and nothing made sense… Seeking something that felt stable, he reached out for Bill’s hand and gripped it. He felt like flesh. A realization hit Dipper then, and he squeezed Bill’s hand as he looked up at him.  
“You aren’t the same Bill, are you?”  
Bill shook his head slowly, returning the squeeze. “Whether you mean from the past or from a different reality… I’m not the same. The Bill Cipher you defeated in Weirdmagedon is gone. My Dipper is gone… in my reality he is, but you are him, just another version… and I’m still Bill Cipher. If you don’t want me here, then I completely understand. I just wanted to see you,” He leaned his forehead against Dipper’s, right over the birthmark that had earned him his nickname. “to feel you again.”  
Dipper felt an odd sense of duality as he stared into Bill’s eye. It was the same familiar eye that had haunted him in his dreams, quite literally, and yet it didn’t look at him the same. Despite the fact that this was Bill Cipher, he didn’t hate him. It was so odd. Just like everything else that happened in Gravity Falls… and that’s what Dipper loved about it. He released Bill’s hand and placed it to his cheek out of a sense of curiosity and something else familiar yet unrecognizable to him. Placing his lips to this alternate version of his enemy, he had a fleeting vision of when he’d cloned himself.  
All of his clones had been versions of himself. Already having a twin, he could say that it didn’t feel like they were his brothers; it had felt more like he was multiple people. This was a similar feeling, only instead of feeling like he was multiple people, it was more like multiple people were inside of him at once. He didn’t know if it was a ghost of an alternate, or himself in that moment, but he knew that a part of him loved the man he was kissing.  
Dipper pulled away for a moment to look at Bill in a new light. He looked human, despite his eye. His features where handsome, whether by a general standard or the phantom thoughts in Dipper’s head. Bill smiled, a soft, relaxed sort of smile and kissed Dipper back. Letting the force of the kiss press into him along with Bill, Dipper leaned back until he was laying on the floor. Bill hovered over him hesitantly.  
“Are you sure this is okay? You don’t feel like I’m using you or that someone else is controlling you, do you?”  
The question made Dipper realize that he wasn’t the first one Bill had tried to seduce, but it didn’t matter to him. If all of those other alternates were still him, then it didn’t matter which one Bill had gone to first. It was like looking at a mirror with a second one angled to create infinite reflections behind you. They were all the same image of the same person.  
Dipper shook his head with a smile. “No. I feel a lot of things right now, but I want to focus on the good feelings… I don’t know which Dipper is saying this to you right now, Bill, but he’s here… and he loves you.”  
Bill seemed about to cry but laughed happily instead, before kissing Dipper’s forehead and then his mouth. Dipper clung to him as they formed to press against one another, and he began stripping Bill’s clothes. They were real, his body was real, his touches were real. This was all completely real.

When they were finished, they lay naked on the floor in one another’s arms and stared at the dust motes traveling above them.  
“So, wait… is there a reality where I end up with, Wendy?”  
Bill smirked. “If that’s your way of saying I wasn’t satisfactory, I could rewind and try again. Or just try again.”  
Dipper shook his head, laying it on Bill’s chest he smiled. “No, I just wanted to clear that up for arguments sake.”  
“Then, yes, I can tell you that basically anything you can think up has its own reality somewhere out there in the infinite possibilities that make up any existence.”  
“My head hurts so much right now… We should go find Mabel before she decides she gets to switch places with herself.”  
“You don’t have to go to a different reality to do that. You have that magic carpet thing, remember. Man, that thing put a real paradox on the whole twin-switch tradition. Or better yet, just switch places traditionally, like your uncles do. Speaking of which, we should probably skedaddle anyway, cause one of them is about to walk through that door and see us laying here and he’s not going to come back from that even though he doesn’t know who we are yet.”  
“Wait, I thought you said no one can see us.”  
“Oh, no. In your own timeline, you can still be seen. Just like Blendin what’s his name. It’s realities that are different.”  
“What?! Get us out of here!”  
Bill snapped his fingers and they were both back in there clothes, with another snap the both of them were gone.  
Stan walked into the attic, scanning the dust laden room. “Geez, what a mess. Looks like some racoons had one heck of a fight on this floor.” He sniffed, covering his nose in disgust upon finding the trash can full of vomit. “Gah! Sick! I don’t know what died in there, but it was a slow and merciless death!”

Dipper sat at a desk in the attic, in his own time and reality, flipping through his journal. It wasn’t as big as the three his gruncle Ford had made, but the contents of it were a spectacle all their own. Mabel came in and leaned over Dipper’s shoulder with a smirk.  
“Writing about your new boyfriend?”  
Dipper slammed his hands over the page in embarrassment. “Mabel!”  
She giggled. “Sorry, I’ll leave you to fawn over your crush. I’ve got some new discoveries of my own I want to scrapbook, anyway. By the way, thanks for coming to get me, I’m sure that whole thing was a little weird, even for you.”  
“After the things I’ve seen today, nothing will ever seem weird again.”  
Mabel shuffled off with a smirk. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up in a place like this.”  
Dipper smiled to himself before going back to his writing. ‘It would seem that in a place like Gravity Falls, anything is possible, and that is a gross understatement if ever there was one. I once thought that this place had given me all that it had to offer, and maybe it had, but only in one reality…’

THE END


End file.
